1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method applied in Electronic Design Automation (EDA), and more particularly, to a method for Intellectual Property (IP) component characterization and a method for path finding thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
Thanks to technology progress in computer science, electronics industry is rapidly growing now. For example, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is a technique, which assists the development engineers to design and simulate the electronic circuitry by using the computing power of the computer system. Especially in developing the Integrated Circuit (IC), different kinds of automation tools had played a significant role in the works such as function verification, layout, electricity analysis, and IC simulation.
In addition, in order to follow the right trend of intensive circuitry and fulfill the requirement of reducing the product development time, how to develop a most economical chip product has become a major topic for development engineers now, and reusing of the circuitry design is one of the techniques to achieve this object. In other words, by applying this technique, various functional circuitries which are well designed can be repeatedly used to build up a new Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). Therefore, the development process of the IC product can be completed in a very short time period. Here, the well designed circuitry layout that can be repeatedly used is also known as an IP (Intellectual Property) component.
In general, an estimate data related to the IP component characteristic can be obtained at the same time when the IP component is being obtained. For instance, the information such as the maximum power consumption and the maximum delay time can be obtained from the developer designing the IP component. However, both of the electrical energy consumed in the circuitry and the delay time it outputs are varied based on different input. When using the IP component, the estimate data of the IP component provided originally is not good enough to accurately provide information related to its operating characteristic.
In the prior art, various test data are determined and provided by development engineers based on their own professional knowledge and working experience, and the test data are sequentially and manually input into the system with the help of a simulation program so as to obtain a report corresponding to each of the simulation results. Then, the key values (e.g. timing, power, etc.) it requires are manually extracted from the report of the simulation results, and the extracted key values are manually keyed in to generate an IP characteristic library which is used by subsequent development process. However, the paths in the IP component are very complicated, thus it is not feasible to manually determine test data for all paths in the IP component. Furthermore, for considering time efficiency, in the method of manually inputting the test data and cooperating with the simulation software to obtain the IP characteristic library, it is possible that only part of the test data are selected for simulation based on the physical requirements and the developer's experience, thus a complete IP characteristic library cannot be obtained.